Annual Expansions?

SamIam

SamIam

New Member
Has anyone heard about this? Can anyone confirm? Here is a blog that I saw:

Blizzard COO, Paul Sams, made public the claim that “starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set - so every 12 months”. This is an ambitious task for a team of designers whose released works have been spanned by large gaps in time, but they say that they are up for the challenge. Joystiq was told by Jeff Kaplan (WoW’s lead designer) that Blizzard’s plan for expansions is “a little bit more ambitious than one every two years. We have to weigh that against the quality of the product and how much content we want to put into it. We won’t put something out until the quality level is there. So, our goal though is to provide content quicker than we have been up until now. We’ve really beefed our team up — we have about 100 now and when we started we had around 50.”
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Ugh. I hope not. When EA (Ultima Online) did annual expansions, they got progressively more stupid every time. It started as a medieval setting, and eventually got robots, ninjas, and shapeshifting elves. I guess at least WoW started with shapeshifters and elves :)
 
First I've heard on it. I'm hoping Blizz learned the lessons of EQ and UO. They've done a good job with expanding endgame content as it is, they just need to make it so you can't put BWL on 24/7 farm status.
 
I trust they are gettiing enoug money from us without having to take more each year for content development.
 
If they do this, I just imagine that content we have been getting as regular patches will become part of expansions. No new instances for free. No new zones for free. No PvP for free.
 
I ended up finding two blogs that claimed annual expansions are coming; that doesn't make it true, though. We'll just have to wait and see. I sure would like to see new content for levels 1-59. Leveling toons becomes boring doing the same thing over and over. Personalizing your toon more would be nice as well; things like having spaces in names, more/different hair styles/colors, adjusting height/weight, stuff like that. Ooh, or how about customizable skins? I could put my face on a NE and win all the breauty contests. :D
 
I think an occasional expansion pack is a fine idea, but making it explicitly annual could be problematic. It might be difficult to continually come out with new ideas large enough for an expansion pack, that don't adversely affect the rest of the game world and game experience in general.

Short of just providing a few new things and some new instances in each expansion.
 
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